The invention is based on a priority application EP 07301123.1 which is hereby incorporated by reference.
This application concerns a method for invoking a communication service that is realized by means of a peer of a peer-to-peer system, a software product and a telecommunication system therefor.
Lowest operational expenditure conversational and collaboration/community services over Internet and overlay networks like voice or multimedia conferencing, instant messaging, push-to-talk, or any kind of information sharing for carriers like internet service providers, network service providers or even telecommunication service providers is highly demanded.
This target is reached by minimum centralized infrastructure like peer-to-peer networks need the ability to provide, find and starting value added services. For massively used services like TeleVoting with a high end server in back or often used services like voice-mailbox which need a long online time it is not possible to deploy them in such low cost networks, as there are no automatism and mechanisms defined yet to deploy and integrate them.
In this domain the International Patent Application No. WO 2005/009019 discloses a peer-to-pee telephone system comprising a plurality of identical end-users and a communication structure through which one or more end-users are connectable for communication purposes. This system is distinguished in that the communication structure is substantially de-centralized with regard to communication route switching therein for connecting said one or more end-users.
Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing promises to be the paradigm with mindshare sufficient to push a number of interesting distributed computing technologies from the shadows into the spotlight.
The use of P2P computing is not limited to decentralize communication clients as in WO 2005/009019. P2P is beginning to look like the paradigm with a large enough slice of mindshare to move a number of promising technologies from the wings into the limelight. Peer-to-peer computing didn't spring into existence in its current form. Rather, it is the child of a number of different parents. First and most important, P2P computing is the natural result of decentralizing trends in software engineering intersecting with available technology. From an engineering perspective, the trend over the last decade, driven by forces such as enterprise application integration, has clearly been away from monolithic systems and toward distributed systems. This trend was inhibited somewhat by the ease of managing centralized applications, but the growth of the Internet, followed by the rise in importance of business to business transactions, made full-scale distributed computing a business necessity. Intersecting this trend is the growth in the availability of powerful networked computers and inexpensive bandwidth. To be effective, P2P computing requires the availability of numerous, interconnected peers.
P2P computing is a subset of distributed computing. The name “peer-to-peer” suggests an egalitarian relationship between peers and, more importantly, suggests direct interactions between peers. P2P applications consist of a number of peers, each performing a specific role in the P2P network, in communication with each other. Typically, the number of peers is large and the number of different roles is small. These two factors explain why most P2P applications are characterized by massive parallelization in function. The best example is the Gnutella network, which consists of a large number of essentially identical peers. In P2P applications, the interesting problems lie in the interaction between the peers and, to a lesser extent, in the peers themselves.